I never want to do this!. Review on Tips on maintaining a Sound System

I wasnt planning to write about sound system, but I thought I should cause of being a sound engineer. I read the articles that is recently written here and was horrified by its errors on it. Let me tell u few secrets right to make sound better.

What is an ideal room?

The most perfect listening rooms are the ones with less reflections which means more absorption. There are other factors like resonance or standing waves that forms due to parallel walls or between floor and ceiling, and phase cancellations. As you know sound travels in the form of waves. So if we have a very reflective room the sound reflects and changes its phase(the angle) and merges with the other wave which will result in cancellation of waves in certain frequency. Result is a bad sound, cause some of the audio spectrum is damaged.

So to avoid this we make the room more absorptive and make the room less parallel. The first and foremost way to achieve this is by having a carpet on the floor and cover your walls with curtains(wondered why the theatres are covered with cloths all around?)This will avoid all the high frequency reflections and give us a very good mids and highs.To avoid boominess or low frequency resonance it is prefered to place the LFE(Low Frequency Driver) or sub woofers in a place where u can get the maximum bass with less boomines or so called punchy bass.Its practically impossible to avoid low frequency reflections cause the wavelength is so huge u cant avoid its reflection. Avoid gaps at the bottom of the doors and also try to make the windows air tight.

What is an ideal sound system?

Its really tough to pin point some brand or product and justify it as the best. While the world is going surround sound it make more sense going for a 5.1 setup or even 6.1 or 7.1 So whats this nos all about? the no before .1 denotes how many channels are present, while the .1 denotes the sub woofer or the LFE. All the theatres in India are 5.1 and its either dolby digital or DTS(Digital Theatre System) The five channels are left, right, centre, left surround and right surround. As the name suggests the speakers are placed on left, right, centre, left surround usually just behind you and just opposite to this the right surround.

The right and Left speakers are basically angled towards the listener, so that it forms a triangle with the listener while the centre is placed exactly straight towards your face. Its important that all the speakers are in the same line atleast the front three. Also its important that all the 5 speakers have the same output power(which means all the speakers should be of same spec). The centre channel is used mainly for dialogues while left and right for background scores and effects. The left and right surround channels are used for ambience and room tones. The newer 6.1 and 7.1 consist of one and two back channels respectively to give more complete surround 3d experience. So lets get back to the selection of ideal sound system.

All the DVD's are dolby digital format while some has both DTS and dolby(dolby is a mandatory format in a DVD while DTS is optional) So its a very important to buy an amplifier or AV receiver which is capable of decoding Dolby digital if not the DTS.I highly recommend Denon because of its price and output. Infact the market is so huge and competitive that almost all the consumer amplifiers such as yamaha, Pioneer, JVC, Sony, Sheerwood, JBL, Bose, Onkyo are good. Now what to look out on an amp? The basic is to see how many watt RMS is the amp delivers per channel.I consider somewhere around 100 is very good while 60 is good enough. Remember the more powerful your amp the more expensive the speakers are.The next to look for is impedance Now what is impedance?

Now I dont wanna go anymore technical its something which your speaker should match with the amps specification. If an 8 ohm amp drives a 4 ohm speaker of the same watt RMS it will drive more power or current from amp which will overload amp, while the opposite will overload your speaker. Now while selecting your speakers its important to match the RMS and impedance of the amp.

There is something called THD(Total Harmonic Distortion) where the less THD the better the speakers are. JBL speakers are well priced and performs well while I prefer to assemble speakers by getting cabinet and high quality drivers. Patience and hard work is the key (which I lack....) to do this on your own. Finally go for a LFE which never should be compromised for. Buy a good quality one cause a bad LFE will spoil the overall quality of the output.

Its mandatory to place the LFE at the front and not at the back as the other revu suggested.There wont be any cancellation or something cause the LFE has frequencies below 150 Hz which other drivers in the channels wont produce(its filtered).

The above mentioned is suitable for stereo setups too...

Hope I wasn't very technical... Anymore help and if u want anything more technical u can contact me....

ciao

vj